


stars (precisely what a horde soldier’s eyes were never taught to be)

by larrymurphycansteponme (thomasthorne)



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Catra (She-Ra) Redemption, Catra (She-Ra)-centric, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post S4, i wrote this before the trailer came out so don’t come for me over the inaccuracies, they both need a hug but they also both need to apologise to their loved ones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:08:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23982097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thomasthorne/pseuds/larrymurphycansteponme
Summary: Catra doesn’t like the stars, and she certainly doesn’t like Glimmer.
Relationships: Adora & Glimmer (She-Ra), Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Catra & Glimmer (She-Ra), Catra/Scorpia (She-Ra)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 77





	stars (precisely what a horde soldier’s eyes were never taught to be)

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this maybe like four days before the trailer dropped to deal with some of my fucking FEELINGS. s4 really made me somehow want catra and glimmer to both grow up healthy and prosper but also to have their arses handed to them for being so goddamn problematic.  
> this is my first spop fic and im just a useless multishipping lesbian so please. let me be.  
> and enjoy :)

That first night, stuck in a room with a bed as hard as her old one, with walls as cool and square and industrial as everything she’s ever known in the Fright Zone, Catra just stares out of the window at the stars. The infinite expanse of soft, round, warm dots, dimly illuminating the blackness of space. There’s something so strangely familiar about them. She doesn’t want to accept that she knows what it is yet.

“Catra?”

Catra winces: somehow, even at a whisper, Glimmer’s voice manages to still be annoying.

They’re sharing this room, expansive, with more soft furnishings than you’d have ever seen even in a Force Captain’s room (though still, it’s not _comfortable_ ) in Prime’s ship. His creepy guards escorted them down several hallways that Catra tried to map out in her mind, before not-so-subtly locking the door as they left. It’s not explicit that they’re _prisoners_ , but Catra certainly feels expendable, to say the least.

She hears the pad of Glimmer’s feet across the floor, and grasps her comforter tighter.

“What?”

Maybe her attempt to pretend to be falling asleep is half-hearted, what with her lying stiffly on her side, shoulders hunched, eyes wide, but it’s not like she wants to talk to Sparkles anyways.

She can hear Glimmer’s breathing amidst the low hum of the ship’s... whatever. Engine? It’s suffocating. It reminds her of simpler times, the old dorm in the Fright Zone. Even, after she first got her own room, being unable to sleep on her own and begrudgingly asking Scorpia to join her.

But Catra doesn’t need to think about any of that right now.

“Can I trust you?” Glimmer asks, and her voice is so much louder all of a sudden that Catra rolls over onto her front, jumping when she sees the princess hovering at the foot of her bed. Even in the darkness of the room, her eyes twinkle.

That’s what the stars remind her of. Once upon a time, Catra might’ve said they were like Adora’s eyes. Because Adora’s eyes were different to everyone else’s. She used to love her eyes— they were special, they weren’t like every other Horde solider’s. Her eyes were precisely what a Horde solider’s eyes were taught not to be; round and careful, intimate. Vulnerable. You could see every atrocity Adora had ever committed plain and simple written across her face, held in her eyes.

What Catra didn’t realise until years later, was that they weren’t special. They weren’t just Adora’s. The night of Princess Prom, Scorpia came down the stairs asking for Catra’s help zipping up her dress, and once she was done, Catra noticed something about her. Her eyes. And it was something that Catra could never escape after it clicked that first time, because Scorpia always looked at her like no one else did. Because everyone else hated her, so Catra thought that meant Scorpia _liked_ her. It was so obvious in her eyes. They were round and careful and intimate and vulnerable, they were precisely what a Horde soldier’s eyes were taught never to be, they were _Adora’s_ eyes.

Princess eyes.

And they shimmer just like the stars, glower like security and safety. The very same thing a princess will use to coerce you into loving them, caring for them, supporting them until they take it all away. Because that’s all princesses are good for. They’re shiny and perfect but they hurt you more than you could imagine and yet they _still_ get to be the good guys.

Catra sighs. “Don’t you think that’s a stupid question?” Collapsing back on the bed, she stares up at the ceiling. Anywhere but the window, or Glimmer’s hard gaze.

“You could’ve ended all of this,” she says. “You could’ve let Prime destroy everything, just like you wanted. Why didn’t you?”

“What do you want from me? Some dumb speech about the power of friendship?” Catra laughs. “I don’t have any friends, Sparkles. I... I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“Okay, well—” there’s a scuffling sound, and Glimmer’s voice grows further— “if you don’t want my help getting out of here, that’s okay. I don’t need you anyway.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“You really think we can get out of here?”

Glimmer’s footsteps become louder once more. “So you don’t want to help Prime. I knew it.”

Catra groans and sits up, smoothing her hair back down. She looks up, reluctantly, to meet Glimmer’s unmoving gaze. Her eyes are round and careful and— and—

“You don’t know anything about me so—” she snarls— “don’t pretend to.”

Glimmer makes a face. “God, how does anyone ever put up with you?”

Sneering back at her, Catra quickly changes the subject. “You can’t just... I don’t know... sparkle your way out of here?”

“Teleport?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” she shakes her head. “Something’s blocking my powers. I— I don’t know if it’s the ship, or the fact we’re outside the atmosphere, or the fact we activated the Heart of Etheria.”

“Yeah, how’d you even do that?” Catra asks, this smug tone lacing her words. She shouldn’t be acting antagonistic but she can’t help it. She’s angry. She’s hurt.

But Glimmer’s hesitance scares Catra.

“We... we balanced the planet.”

“What does that _mean_?”

“It means,” she says, in her shrill and snooty voice that Catra has always hated, “all of the elemental princesses connected with their rune stones.”

She continues before it even hits Catra: “It unlocked a huge, unstable amount of magical power that made us super-charged, but... the First Ones engineered it so that all that energy would go to She-Ra. She’s the trigger for the weapon.”

“... all of the princesses?”

Catra can feel her ears twitch and flatten as she speaks. Her voice is too gravelly and broken and small, and here Sparkles is standing above her like _she_ has the higher ground.

A frown creeps across Glimmer’s face. “You didn’t know?”

“What?”

“Catra, Scorpia’s with the rebellion.”

It’s visceral. Guttural. Like a stab wound, right in the stomach. It— Catra wondered but she never actually thought that it was true. That Scorpia would leave and _then_ — 

Glimmer almost smiles. “You didn’t know she left?”

“I didn’t know she left me for _you_ ,” she says, but it’s loud and harsh and her voice breaks in all of the wrong places. Shaking, trembling, clawing at the blanket, Catra realises her eyes are wide and prickly, and Glimmer is just staring at her like she’s said something truly horrific.

And she just blinks, with her big, perfect eyes, and Catra wants to scream. She wants to scream because her eyes are all too much like Scorpia’s, but in this twisted and sick way that makes her want to claw them out. Because Scorpia was always— Scorpia was something safe and reassuring, she was consistent when Catra didn’t have _any_ normality in her life. Scorpia was warm and round and soft, and Catra wanted to protect her. Keep her in her back pocket, her and her perfect, stupid princess eyes. Eyes that weren’t made for what the Horde makes you witness.

“She’s a princess,” Glimmer concludes, after a searing silence.

“No she’s not.”

“You wouldn’t _let_ her be one.”

“Because she’s not—” Catra hesitates. “You _used_ her to activate your stupid weapon, and look where that got us!”

“Oh really—” she clasps her hands together with a mocking tone— “you’re going to accuse _me_ of using someone? You?”

“You don’t know anything about me—”

“Really, because I seem to know everyone who ever cared about you pretty well.”

There’s a moment, in that split second, where Catra lunges at Glimmer, all claws and this horrible, frustrated sound caught at the back of her throat. But she stops. She stops because she sees something in Glimmer’s eyes— in her stupid princess eyes, eyes that are so easy to read— that makes her body seize up: fear.

“I,” she pants, “don’t owe you anything. You don’t get to say stuff about me just because _Adora_ is in love with you or whatever. I didn’t have to save you.”

Glimmer glares at her, eyes so narrow you’d hardly notice their sparkle. “Then why did you?”

“I,” she starts, but she doesn’t know where to begin or end. It’s all too much. It’s something that Catra has carried now for years and she doesn’t know where to put it all down. She’d release it out into the vacuum of space if she could, and even then she has an itching feeling it’d find its way back to her.

_“Did you ever stop to think, maybe they’re not the problem?”_

“What did you offer Double Trouble?” Catra asks.

“Money,” Glimmer says, as though it’s obvious. “That’s all they want.”

Catra stares down at her lap.

“What—” suddenly, Glimmer is bending down to her level, all of her glitter and sparkle catching in the starlight from the great window— “did you think they were your _friend_?”

“I—” Catra catches herself, and scrunches her face up— “no.”

“You trusted them, didn’t you?”

“I just— they were nice.”

“They’re an actor, Catra. You can’t trust them.”

Her tail wraps around herself, squeezing her in a hug. Pathetic and half-hearted. “Well I know that now,” she says. “Did you have to make them so _mean_?”

Glimmer frowns. “I only payed them to tell you the advance on Brightmoon failed.”

Oh.

Catra stiffens. “What?”

Everything... everything they said. It wasn’t from Glimmer, or anyone in the rebellion who could possibly know Catra. It was just Double Trouble, Double Trouble who somehow managed to perfectly deduce Catra’s character and wear her like a mask. Because she was too naive. Trusting. Vulnerable. And somehow, somehow they managed to get deeper under Catra’s skin than anyone else and made her realise how terrible she is of her own volition. Not through betrayal and trauma and abuse, no, Catra is just a bad person.

_“You made your choice.”_

She finds herself clutching her cheek, as though it still hurts. There’s something spectral about it, a ghost of someone who gave up on her. Not because she didn’t care, but because she realised Catra would never change. No, Catra knows that in this horrible way, Adora still cares. Cares about whoever she thought she was, didn’t realise she _couldn’t_ be after everything. And as much as Catra can resent Adora for everything, she knows that deep down, she wants what they once had. What she drove Adora to completely give up on. 

It takes everything in her to not burst into tears right there. Squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she takes a few breaths. Tries to calm herself, ground herself, but everything around her screams that this isn’t fine, this is the end of everything, there is nothing left for Catra here. How can it be _fine_?

_“Scorpia would be here if everything was fine.”_

“They said something to you, didn’t they?” Glimmer says knowingly. “That’s— that’s why you were like... that, when I found you.”

Catra shrugs. “I lost everything. Adora, Scorpia—” she realises that’s all she ever really had— “and the war. The war I don’t even care about. And it’s all my fault. Everything that happened was my choice, because— I— no one else is like me. Even after all of the stuff I’ve been through, with the people I grew up around... they’re not like me. I’m a bad person,” she says, and it weighs a ton. “I— I don’t have anything left to stay for.”

For a moment, Glimmer is silent. She just shimmers softly, standing tall and regal above Catra. She’s celestial. Perfect. And yet, as Catra watches her face, her flickering eyes, she can see Glimmer struggle with what she says next.

“I mean, if you really feel like you’ve lost everything, why don’t you try to get it back?”

Catra shakes her head. “I always told myself I didn’t need anyone. I didn’t need Adora to protect me, I didn’t need Scorpia to coddle me but... but I was lying.” She sniffs. “I needed them, but they never needed me. Why would they bother with me now?”

That’s the thing with princesses. They leave. Just like the stars left all that time ago, after they made Etheria bright and safe and not stuck, isolated in some shadow dimension. They eluded everyone who had ever needed them, after twisting it all up into some grand illusion, a promise of dependency.

_“You promise?”_

And even now, Catra is unloading all of this onto Glimmer for no reason. She just feels compelled to, drawn in by that same old sob story, the wide eyes of someone who’s just so important. Validating. Good. Right.

Catra needed Adora to protect her. Ever since she left, everything has hurt her, torn her down, crumpled her up like a piece of paper into a ball and tried to discard her. Everyone except—

_“We could be, you know, happy.”_

Scorpia. Scorpia, who made everything fine. Who would listen to Catra when she needed it, but wouldn’t press her to talk about anything when she couldn’t. Scorpia who was good and consistent and kind, Scorpia who shared Adora’s eyes and her heart. And Catra pushed her away. That wasn’t like it was with Adora, no, Adora left the Horde to fix the world, because she cared more about some stupid war than she did about whatever she and Catra once had. Adora leaving Catra was never intentional, but rather the fallout of something so much _bigger_ than Catra. Something worth so much more. 

Scorpia left Catra because it hurt too much to care about her like that. Like she was the only thing that mattered.

So it’s Catra’s fault. And she’s a bad friend. And she just drives people away, then takes them for granted. And she knows that now.

The stars have finally come back as some glaring reminder, each time Catra looks up at the sky or out of the window, that she will never be good enough for a princess. They are precisely what a Horde solider is taught never to be and yet all Catra has ever known, all she’s ever truly cared about is a place in her heart where those two worlds meet and she refuses to accept it.

Glimmer glances down at her feet, then back up at Catra. She’s curled up in a tiny ball, knees pulled up to her chest, tail wrapping around her ankles.

She won’t meet Glimmer’s eyes. She refuses.

And yet, she feels the weight of the bed shift as Glimmer sits down, a good metre away from her, but still. It scares her.

Glimmer sighs. “For what it’s worth,” she says, “I know Scorpia doesn’t hate you. She— before I went to find you and Hordak, she told me not to hurt you.”

Catra’s ear twitches.

“She really said that?”

“Yeah,” Glimmer says. “For some unfathomable reason, she cares about you. She said she didn’t want to betray you.”

She sniffs. God, Catra refuses to cry in front of _Sparkles_ of all people. “Well it’s not like I can fix things stuck up here,” she says, trying to change the topic of conversation. Glimmer smiles softly, the starlight catching the high points of her face.

She really does glow. And it’s not just her eyes. Catra wishes there was something special and beautiful and subtle about her, something like the princesses have. But Catra was never chosen for anything good, never destined for anything, never gifted a fate written in the stars. All she knows how to do is scream.

“So that’s why we need to get out,” Glimmer says.

And she’s right.

_“You don’t have to go back there, we can fix this.”_

Catra does want to fix things.

_“Or, you know, counterpoint: we don’t go back.”_

For the first time in her life, Catra feels something so potently hurtful and doesn’t let it eat her up inside. Her heart thuds against her rib cage. There is no more Horde. There’s nothing for her there. She hates it. She’s always hated it, and there’s just been one thing stopping her from leaving, one stupid realisation about a single, universal pair of eyes that shouldn’t even matter.

Catra can fix things by herself, for herself. For the people she cares about.

The stars have come back, bolder than before, brighter than the sun. And Catra thinks that’s a sign.

Catra thinks that is hope.

**Author's Note:**

> *meanwhile, back on etheria  
> adora: pffff imagine forgiving catra for mistreating her loved ones and taking them for granted  
> scorpia: could never be me
> 
> jk jk i hope they all get married s5 finale noelle please   
> also!!!!!!!! tysm for reading!!!! kudos and comments are my lifeline so please feel free to drop some!! 
> 
> you can also hmu for discussions about spop and summoning the ancient gods on tumblr @wastelanddais :) 💓💞💗


End file.
